


aplomb

by jasminetea



Series: Unprofessional [3]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dance, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Ballet, Canon Character of Color, Character Study, Character of Color, Female Character of Color, Gen, Intersectionality, LGBTQ Character of Color, LGBTQ Female Character of Color, Lesbian Character of Color, Modern, POV Character of Color, Race
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-19
Updated: 2012-08-19
Packaged: 2017-11-12 10:50:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/490066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jasminetea/pseuds/jasminetea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Angel will be a ballerina, no matter what anyone says.  Neither her sexuality, her body, nor her color will bar her way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	aplomb

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://xmen-firstkink.livejournal.com/397.html?thread=5957005#t5957005) on the kink meme.

It often surprises people to see that Angel keeps her hair long.  Everything else about her is rebellion and distrust, so the long hair – shampooed, conditioned, well-kept, moussed, never out of place – is an oddity.

When people ask, she flippantly replies that it's easier to pull back into a bun this way.  Sometimes she'll say it's because nothing else about her is ballerina-like at all, and she felt she really should have something _traditional_ about her – but really, what she does not say is that she does it for her mother.

“Keep your hair long, won’t you?”

And Angel, who’s said _no_ to her mother more times than she can count, said _fine_ this one time and meant it.

Angel does not wear her heart on her sleeve, but this is how she tells the world how much she loves her mother.

 

 

Angel tattoos wings onto her back when she’s sixteen.  She’s pretty sure it’s not legal, but she doesn’t care, and it’s not as if the tattoo parlor she’s at gives a fuck either.

She hates her name, the way she imagined as a child that because she was Angel, she’d grow wings and fly away and out of her family’s apartment, the overcrowded schools, the teachers who didn’t give shit.  Her quince’s passed, she hasn’t grown wings, and she’s fucking angry at the world.

“I want wings,” she tells the man at the desk.  He opens the book and shows her images of massive wings, feathers with their detailed lines, so soft she can feel it.

“No,” she says.  “I want another kind of wings.”

So she has dragonfly wings placed upon her.

 

 

Shortly after she gets her first, and only, tattoo, she finds out her mother put her in the lottery and that she’s going to a private high school now.

Angel doesn’t want to go.  Rich kids with their fancy cars, their designer clothes, their concern about their _boyfriends_.  She wants none of it.

Her mother insists though, so Angel goes.  The place is known for its dance program, and since her mother didn’t ask for her opinion at all, Angel winds up with A period ballet.

She shudders at the thought of having to wear tutus and trying to be a swan.

 

 

For once in her life, Angel discovers she is actually _good_ at something.  She takes to ballet so very naturally; the way the body holds itself steady as it moves through space, the way dancers make it look effortless, she loves it and the art loves her back.

She goes onto pointe quickly.  Her first day of pointe class, she arrives with no shoes.  The teacher asks why, and Angel says it’s because all she could find were shoes in pink.

The teacher looks at her quizzically.  “What other colors would they make?”

Angel’s face heats with humiliation and she goes through the class in her slippers.

She goes home that day, searches the internet for answers, and spends hard-earned money figuring out how to marker and dye satin-baby-pink shoes so they match her skin.

 

 

One of the upperclassmen tutors Angel to get her up to speed.  Her classmates have had years to learn, and Angel has years to make up for in a short span of weeks and months.

“No, no, no.  _Feel_ the music, Angel.  _Be_ Clara as she finally get to dance with her prince!”

She steps in and marks the steps.  She can’t do any of the lifts, so instead, her hands stay on Angel’s ribs.  Angel can feel the press of their breasts as they breathe heavily.  She can see the sweat gathering at the juncture of her breasts; she’s always loved how women smell.

Angel kisses her, a chaste kiss, really, and the upperclassman says, “I guess it’s Clara and her princess for you, huh?”

She leans down and seals their lips together in a wet mess.

Then they’re doing an entirely different kind of dance that involves Angel’s leotard being stripped so her tights can be pulled down.  It leaves her pressed against the mirror, her legs spread, as the girl’s fingers push in and Angel can see herself over her shoulder, and reflected in the mirror across the room.  All flushed and dripping, Angel doesn’t really believe that’s herself.

But everything disappears as she orgasms.

 

 

Angel tries to go professional right after she graduates.  To her dismay, the choreographers are always asking her to tuck her pelvis in, and Angel wants to scream because this is the way her body is.  It's agonizing knowing her body is so close to a ballerina’s, but the curve of her breasts and fullness of her ass bar her from it.  She thinks about trying to lose the weight, but then says fuck it, because she isn’t going to starve herself to make some has-been dancer happy.

She stops auditioning for ballet companies and goes for companies that don’t care so much for alignment.

 

 

She receives a letter in the mail from QT Dance Co announcing they have an opening for a ballerina.  She’s not sure who gave up her mailing address, but she thinks about clocking them over the head.

Angel's heard of QT Dance Co.  Fuck, at this point, if you were gay, a dancer, and hadn't heard of them, you weren't that gay.  There's so much noise surrounding them that Angel doesn't know if she should audition or ignore the talk, because anything that good – a company just for queers, really? – couldn't be true.

She’s not surprised when she Googles the Company and finds one of the few scathing reviews out there. 

_…There is no doubt that Queerly Transgressive has excellent dancers.  Quite a few deserve national, if not international, acclaim.  There is also no doubt that their Artistic Director, Charles Xavier, is leading them to new heights, not only in choreography, but in vision._

_However, it is apparent there are only men on stage._ White _men at that.  The only woman to grace the stage was Xavier’s sister, Raven, who only came on to make a brief announcement about a raffle.  A closer examination of the program reveals the only women involved are behind the stage.  In fact, not a single biography or picture of a woman was to be found.  Neither were there any women of color.  It was a shame, considering how many people of color, and women, were in the audience, myself included._

_The GLBT community is, and should be, proud of all Xavier and his company have achieved.  However, how proud can we be, when the most cutting-edge dance company continues to demonstrate that to be queer means to be white and male?_

_\--Jubilation Lee_

Angel stops reading the comments on the article after the first few.  She thinks the article is not so much scathing as honest.

She crumples up the flyer and tosses it in the waste bin.

 

 

Angel meets Raven Darkholme at the dance club she works in as a go-go dancer during her free time, a job she didn’t even know still existed until she took this job.  Still, it’s better than when her side-job had been an exotic dancing.  The dance company she’s with doesn’t pay much to visiting dancers and nowhere near enough to pay the rent in this city.  She’s only been hired for this series of performances.  Apparently all the folklorico she did when she was younger paid off, or maybe it’s because she used to date the director, Barnell, while she was in her straight phase.  Regardless of either possibility, she still gets paid.

She’s done a bit of everything in this point, but it’s the modern companies that keep hiring her, not minding her less than ideal body.  She still yearns for the tapping of pointe shoes across the stage, and the restrained, overflowing joy ballet contains.

“You’d be a marvelous dancer,” the blonde says.  Angel thinks this is one of the worse pick-up lines she’s heard.  When she tells this to Raven later, Raven giggles and says she needs to hear her brother.

“I _am_ a dancer,” Angel replies with disdain.

“I know,” the girl grins.  “I recognized you from the butoh piece InkBoat did a few years ago.”

Angel doesn’t know whether to be more shocked the girl believes her, or that she recognizes her from that show.

The blonde opens up her pea-coat – who wears one inside a club? – and reveals a blue-sequined leotard. 

“How about I show you my moves, if you show me yours?”  The look in her eyes says she knows how terrible that line is, but Angel thinks, what the hell, and goes out to the floor with her.

 

 

In the end, it’s all about who you know.  Raven turns out to be Charles Xavier’s brother, the difference in last name due to some long, complicated drama that would put a telenovela to shame – Angel tunes the whole sordid tale out.  At the end of it, Raven tells her she really ought to audition for QT Dance Co.

“They need some women you know; I despair of ever getting Charles to stop picking black unitards.”

Angel doesn’t know how to feel, so she sneers.  “They need color, that’s what.”

Raven laughs.  “Exactly!  And glitter!”

She misunderstands, but Angel laughs alongside her, and as it always does, the mimicry turns into the genuine thing.

 

 

She marches onto the stage, her face a scowl.

“Miss Salvadore,” Charles Xavier asks her, “why do you think we should hire you?”

She could say it’s because she’s a damn good dancer, but then, anyone has to be to audition.  “Because,” she growls, “you fucking need some colored people in here.”  She isn’t concerned about cursing; she’s heard about Charles Xavier and his partner, Erik Lehnsherr’s, infamous remarks about professionalism.

“Miss, we don’t hire people just because of the color of their skin.  We don’t _do_ that.”  Fucking Xavier and his wide blue eyes that say he’s telling the truth, but fuck it, Angel _knows_.  Knows in every single fiber of her body that people _do_ , and who does he think he _is_ to tell her this bullshit?

She pushes it all down and glares instead.

Lehnsherr nudges Xavier, and they share one of those _looks_ that couples have when they’ve attained that level of intimacy that requires no words.

“Oh,” Xavier says, “this is what Raven was talking about right?”

Lehnsherr nods.  Xavier turns his wide stare back at her.  Angel waits for a reply.

It’s Lehnsherr who speaks, “Congratulations Miss Salvadore; welcome to QT Dance Co.”  Xavier cringes at the moniker.  Angel imagines she and Erik will get along swimmingly.

 

 

“I got the job because I know you,” Angel tells Raven.

“No,” Raven says.  She shows her the acceptance letter again and points at the date.  It’s a week before her audition.

“We went to see you perform.  You’d already turned in your application, and Charles liked you enough that he approved it right after.”

“Then why did I have to audition?”

Raven looks down at her and shrugs.  “It’s my brother, who knows what goes on in his head except Erik?”

That night, Angel takes Raven to get scales tattooed onto her back.

 

 

“I know you like this new-age modern stuff, but I’m here for the ballet work you started out with.”

“Swell,” Charles says.  “I’ve been meaning to get some ballet back into our repertoire!”

Angel is unsure if he’s just stringing her along, especially when he tells her she’ll be a principal – she’d expected to be dancing in the corps, or in the wings, whatever his company called it, for a long, long time before even getting a solo.

It turns out he is sincere.  Her first performance, her first number with this company, is centered entirely on her.  She is not there to make some other dancer look good, they’re all there to support her for once.

Angel knows this piece was made with time, care, and love.  Perhaps, it was even made _for_ her: it is unapologetically male in its athleticism but so very familiar in its careful carriage.  Everything from the simple piques to the fouettes are as they should.

Her body’s never felt this good.  She feels everything – the lights, the audience, the music, the dancers, _everything_ – from the top of her head, to the curve of her elbows down to her fingertips, her weight to the floor, her spine tall, her hips and shoulders aligned and oh this is what she has missed.

She feels like the brightest star in the sky, long before the audience comes to their feet with a cascade of clapping.

 

 

“I have to dye my pointe shoes,” she tells Xavier.

“Is that a problem?”  He looks at her with those eyes and that smile.  This time, she believes him.

 

 

That night, she calls home.

“Mama,” Angel says.  “I’m a professional ballerina now.”

And her mother replies, “Oh, honey, you’ve always been,” and together they laugh.

**Author's Note:**

> Music: Massive Attack's "Paradise Circus" and Florence + the Machine's "Only if For a Night (Live at the Effenaar)."
> 
> This is influenced by [this article](http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/dec/04/black-ballet-cassa-pancho) on Ballet Black, and the comments [here](http://ontd-feminism.livejournal.com/465979.html).
> 
> Also, [InkBoat](http://www.inkboat.com/) really is a dance company that is influenced by butoh.


End file.
